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Trump is still scrambling the minds of the elites

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The Mar-a-Lago raid has brought out the worst instincts of the pundit class.
We all know by now that, last week, the FBI raided former president Donald Trump’s private home, in Mar-a-Lago, and retrieved 20 boxes. We know from the now unsealed search warrant and property receipt that these boxes included a host of documents, including Roger Stone’s executive grant of clemency, a leatherbound box of documents, two binders of photos, a handwritten note, an item labelled ‘Info re: president of France’, and 11 sets of classified documents. Some of these were marked top secret.
We all know by now that the search followed a January visit by the National Archives, which retrieved 15 boxes, and the Justice Department subpoenaed more records in the spring. Some of those were turned over by Trump’s team in June.
The affidavit laying out what exactly convinced the judge that evidence for a crime might be found at Mar-a-Lago has not yet been unsealed. But we all know by now that the probable cause was related to evidence of violations of federal law, including the Espionage Act.
That’s it. That’s all we know.
In fact, it’s all anyone knows, apart from a small number of people who work for the Justice Department and the FBI and have read the affidavit. Contrary to what thousands of pundits and politicians want you to believe, this is all the information they have, too. And that means they are no better equipped than the average American to judge how big a security breach the documents seized represent, and whether or not they justify the historic, norm-breaking step of raiding the home of a former and potential future president.
There has also been reporting from unnamed sources, such as a report, which claims that classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among those sought by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago. There has been reporting from Fox News that some of the records seized should have been covered by attorney-client privilege.
There has also been plenty of breathless conjecture from the very same media outlets that brought you the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory and the Steele dossier (with its outlandish allegation that Trump had procured prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room that the Obama family once stayed in). An NBC News report, for instance, claims that ‘the documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago could include names of CIA sources in Moscow’.

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